YouSaid · the spoken record

Elijah Millgram

lines on the record: 75
first: 2021-06-16
most recent: 2021-06-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Here's more experience since we're talking about philosophical experience. My experience is that when you look at issues in aesthetics that crop up when you're thinking about one thing or another, including logic, epistemology, kind of Frankfurt stuff about what it takes to own what you think, there's aesthetics at the heart of it. And when you look at the aesthetics problem, the rest of it changes. You get leverage. So yet you should absolutely pay attention to aesthetics if you're in philosophy.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leverage. Aesthetics has been ghettoized. You know, if you look back a couple hundred years, if you look at people who are sort of strong all-round philosophers, they knew they had to have views in aesthetics because they would need those views for something else. Kant had to have views in aesthetics to make sure he'd gotten the first critique right. Schopenhauer had to have views in aesthetics. Nietzsche had to have views in aesthetics. Hume had to have views in aesthetics. And somehow we've gotten the idea that, well, okay, aesthetics, it's housed in philosophy departments for historical reasons, but everybody has the attitude that we already know we don't need to listen to anything these people have to tell us. We don't care. And they also think, and the people who do aesthetics have somehow internalized this, they often, they typically don't expect anyone else to be interested in what they do and to have a use for what they do. This is terribly wrong.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You won't be surprised to hear that if there's a domain in which I think I have special experience, meaning experience that most people don't have, it's in philosophy. I have something like 40 years of training in kind of, okay, this is promising, this is going to work, pan out into something interesting, this probably is not. This will come together in a really cool way. Oh no, that one's not going anywhere, right? It's very specialized. Not a lot of people have a use for it, but it's unusual and I've got it.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably I shrug and walk away the way I shrug and walk away when, you know, before I left Salt Lake, some guy turned up on my doorstep and hid the story about why I should install solar panels on my roof. It made economic sense. And I just kind of shrugged and said it's a distraction. I'm trying to stay focused.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More objections. And the objections don't run out. At some point, I say, okay, it's time to move on. We're moving to the next argument, but not because they ran out of objections. I'll give you a data point, actually. Sometimes I teach the same thing more than once. And there's a paper that I found it works to start a practical reasoning class off with. It's Michael Smith's Hume and Theory of Motivation. You might know it or you might not, right? It works for the purpose. And when students come up with an interesting, decisive, trenchant, cool objection, I mean, I type it up for them and give it out to them in the next class, but I also save it. I'm compiling these objections. I think this paper is something like 25 pages, and I now have a document that's more than 30 pages of objections. The objections don't run out. And so, when you ask me, what's your resolved view in this problem space where I've been looking at arguments where I know very well that the objections don't run out?”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's fine. You know, if you're a philosopher, you're already in the business of saying, look, I'm not going to consider lots of economic opportunities. There are lots of ways to make much more money than this, right? I mean, this is actually material I've taught and I think about. I have an ongoing interest in personal identity, although it's a little bit different from the Parfity-like interest from these kinds of things. So here's how I teach, right? The class, they turn up having read something. Maybe it's some of reasons in persons, and it has teletransporters and things like teletransporters. And I come to class with an outline of arguments that I've extracted from the reading. And maybe they come to class I often assign as homework something like that. They come to class in that line of an argument they've extracted from a passage in their reading. And we step through one of these arguments and I ask them what's wrong with it. I have really bright students, so it might take them a little while to get going, but they get going and they start producing objections.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you can get people to do it, if you can get people to do it, it's great. I've done a lot of talks in sort of this format. Usually they actually split the difference when you do a talk like this. People ask you to do a sort of five-minute warm-up to kind of get people all on the ball together. But yeah, I have a lot of fun doing that. And it makes sense to me.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you're not sacrificing interest for that. You want to make sure you set it exactly right, not because you're competing with other people, but because the formulation is what you have to convey. Here's something you could be thinking. We could just get rid of the talks, right? So in previous stages in my life, I thought, why do I bother going to talks? I mean, I can read way faster than I can hear. And if I zone out for a moment, you know, when I'm reading, I can just go back. But if I zone out while they're giving the talk, I can't raise my hand and say, can you just repeat the last five minutes? So it's just not efficient. The reason you go to talks is for the Q&A, right? It's that point of Plato. So you want to see if the person can answer questions about the view they presented, but then you want them to have the view presented clearly. You don't want the questions to be them cleaning up the sloppiness in the presentation because they hadn't stuck to the way they thought it out.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I really don't think it's about let me separate out two things there's interesting and then there's I don't know protecting yourself from people's complaints I actually think that maybe this is just me right I have a blind spot for my own practice right but I do script my own talks but I rehearse them so it looks like I'm right they're interactive right that's the way it looks right I don't just monotonously read the thing that is written so as a typewrite everybody could do that and that would just be”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know why they do it. And it's actually what I do. It's becoming a practice that's less frequent, but I know why they do it. Suppose you're in some other field, maybe it's economics or it's a lab science, right? When you turn up to give a talk, your talk is describing something else, right? The result you got in your lab. But when you're a philosopher, you turn up to give your talk, the result is the talk, right? And so you want to make sure that it's as carefully crafted as you can make it because you can't just sort of point over somewhere else to the graphs you got, right? So I do understand why people do it that way. It makes sense to me. I mean, they make it boring, right? There's no reason that when you read a paper, it has to come out boring. That's just bad, you know, staging. But I understand why they script it.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so bad. So it's thin in a way that the first one isn't. So I was actually visiting at All Souls when he was finishing it up and I tried to have conversations with him about it and about the draft, right? And, you know, we had frequent conversations, you know, after lunch and they would within seconds turn into Parfit saying, but look, it's obviously right. You just know that torturing babies for fun is a bad thing. Whatever you think about the merits of torturing babies, not that I think it's a good thing, you can sort of see that the environment is somehow whittled him down or thinned him down. I don't know enough to say for sure how it happened, but that's my impression. It's too cloistered an environment for you to want to spend that much of your life in it.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Parfort Rode, wonderful first book. I mean, I still teach this first book at the Reasons and Persons book. His last book was horrifically awful. I don't know if I want to blame it on the institution.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so if you wander into okay, I'm no longer a member of the APA because I don't think there should be such an organization, but I imagine this is still true. If you wander into an Eastern Division APA hotel lobby, you'll see this sea of people who basically look identical. All the guys are a little bit scruffy and they're in sport jackets and sneakers in there, right? So the superficial stuff, there's a kind of homogenous appearance. But when I cast about thinking about philosophers I've known, they're inside. They're often surprisingly different. Surprisingly different in the way they live their lives and in what matters to them and what they think is reasonable. I can think about it some more, but I actually don't know what I would come up with. It's a really good question.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're right now in a part of the world where people do pay attention to the food and other, I guess this is a misleading sounding word, sensual aspects of their life. In the Bay Area, people notice the view. They pay attention to how things feel. When they exercise, surprisingly often, it's not about how they look. It's about how good it makes them feel. I find something similar. Sometimes I spend time in northern Italy. I find a similar awareness of, you know, the enjoyments that you actually sense. But I don't see it varying so much by profession as by where people live. Elsewhere in Salt Lake City, when you run across somebody who notices, tastes what he eats and notices, right? You think, wow, that's unusual.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me think about that for a moment, but while I'm thinking, let me resist your observation. I mean, I watch the same thing. And here's why. I mean, since I have an interest in mill, thinking about the principle of utility, I mean, okay, there's an early version and a late version, right? The early version is the benthamite version where it's about maximizing the total pleasure and minimizing the pain that people experience. Or he thinks of these as sensations. And I found myself thinking, okay, maybe that's a reasonable way to direct to shape policy when you have a population of people who know how to enjoy themselves and who do taste the food they eat and how often do you see that and what I see actually is geographical variation. So actually in the East Bay, and you're in San Francisco, right? You're in a part of the world.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I've never so when I was 18 or whatever it was, I read the Open Society and I read the logic of scientific discovery. And each one, there's a cool idea. It was nice to have the cool idea. Maybe I didn't need a book to get it. Somebody could just tell you the cool idea. Maybe the idea is too simple and you kind of move past it after a while. If a philosopher over the course of his professional life has a few cool ideas that you're happy to have heard about, I mean, he did good. So I'm not going to complain about Popper. I don't myself see the idea of being a popperian that you would sort of, this would be a school you would join or something like that. But, you know, I'm glad I heard about those ideas.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just sprang to his mind, more and more of them instantly. And so he ended up thinking of arguments as the idea that you could force somebody to believe something by giving them an argument. That's just taking advantage of somebody's disability, right? That they could only think of one argument they can't think of more. And that's why he titled his book, I guess it's his second book, Philosophical Explanations. His line was, okay, I know better than this. I'm not going to try to twist your arm with arguments. I'm going to give you explanations for things. And you can buy them or not, but hopefully they'll be illuminating. That's a very interesting place for somebody to be you. You have to be as smart as him to be in the place that he was.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Point I realized that when you discussed something with Nozick, he instantly saw arguments sort of a sheaf, a panoply of arguments for and against and counter-arguments that would just appear to him all at once. This came up in a conversation in his office when maybe we have a little bit too much in common that way. I was an advisee and he said, well, what about this point? And I said, give me a minute and I'll think of an argument. And he looked at me and he said, that's the problem that I will think of an argument. So the way a lot of philosophers make up their minds about things is they sort of consider some question and then they find an argument. And if the argument seems like it gets them a conclusion, that's enough for them. They stop because they can't think of any more arguments, right? And if you could only think of one argument, this is a good way of any way, like Purse would say, of settling on something, right? That wouldn't work for Nozick because arguments”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give you two of them. I'll only give you the two that I've heard directly. There's a story that's sort of hearsay, but maybe, you know, I shouldn't, right? I T-8 for him once. And I discovered how he taught. He would assign huge piles of material that he wanted to read, but he wouldn't write a lecture. He would just read the assignment, the reading assignment all week in parallel with the class. He would turn up five or ten minutes early before class and lock himself in his office. He refused to be disturbed in those five minutes. And then he would get up in front of the class and he would open his mouth and a lecturer would come out. I can't imagine being able to teach that way. When I lecture, I spend most of my week preparing for my lectures. I can't imagine just having it happen like that. Here's another, okay, this I think is philosophically interesting.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And philosophers have, they invite people to have reactions, right? Snap judgments. I mean, these snap judgments get dignified with the term intuition, but they're just snap judgments. And you might think, what could the value of these snap judgments be? And why would you want to systematize them? Why would you think they were worth anything at all? This is the methodology in philosophy that when you know that something's been produced by this methodology, you should go into it being very skeptical that anything of value could come out of it. Unless you have some special reason to think that the snap judgments going in are high quality and they somehow are guaranteed to capture something important, you shouldn't think that systematizing them is going to give you anything important or be of high quality.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay. Sometimes you'll have a topic of sort of current interest and there'll be something work in philosophy that touches on it directly and speaks to it directly. But often that's just not the way philosophy works. I mean, philosophy produces, it's got internal dynamics. And eventually there's kind of downstream upshots, but you can't just sort of turn around and say to the, okay, we have something turned up in the news and we need to know what to do. What do we do that you usually get really bad philosophy and trolley problems in particular, not that they were, I mean, think about that genre of philosophizing. There's some kind of a thought experiment, right? Maybe, you know, something about a trolley swerving from one track to the other. I mean, there are a lot of these thought experiments, maybe thought experiments about cutting people's brains in half and putting them in different bodies.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can you hope for, and I guess the fourth question was what is it to be a human being? I think one of these questions is what's the meaning of life? Just on that last score, the meaning of life in analytic philosophy has been pushed to the very, very, very, very distant margins of the field instead of getting, as I think it should get, our most serious attention. So when you ask that question, I end up feeling sort of depressed.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That there's a phrase that non philosophers use that philosophers never use. It's starting a sentence with my philosophy is. And he pointed out that what's going to follow is some view that the person simply will not reconsider or give up. But that's not what philosophy is about. Philosophy is about noticing that there's something you've been taking for granted and maybe it's time to have second thoughts about it. And again, if that's your view of what philosophy requires, there are a great many people in my line of work who don't live up to that. I mean, that is just disappointing. They're just very, very confident in the way they do things and they're not going to have second thoughts. And then there's a third way of making out seeing what philosophy is. It's got central questions that somehow don't go away. I guess Plato Socrates, he says, so the question is, how should you live? So that's one of them. And Kant had these four questions, right? What can you know and what should you do?”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So sometimes I think philosophy is an applied science. It's the machine tool industry of the mind. We make the intellectual tools that make the intellectual tools where engineering and engineering science were very high up in the value chain so people don't notice, but that's what we do. And then on that take, I have all of these colleagues, most of my colleagues who think that what they're doing is completely useless and they're proud of it. They have the attitude that John Dewey complained about where you think of yourself as a member of the leisure class and you're glad that you don't do anything useful. There's a second take on philosophy I can't get away from which is that it's a response of a certain kind to the imperative of the Delphic Oracle, right? Know thyself. Philosophy requires you not to take things for granted and just, okay, I had a colleague in a previous job who remarked to me”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To answer the question, you have to have a view about what it is to be philosophical. And the problem here is that I have three different views. I mean, I worry about this question a lot. I think it's part of philosophy to be aware.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's often hard to get the non-philosophers to engage you philosophically in the way that a philosopher would. So talking with philosophers ends up being a large part of your diet.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this is generally true as a professional vice or handicap of philosophy. For my own part, I actually do try to, I mean, there's two ways you can interact with non-philosophers. There's the dead ones, you read them, right? And then there are the live ones. And I try to do both to talk to people who aren't philosophers and also to talk to dead non-philosophers. I'm an enthusiast for recently Norbert Elias, who I guess started out as a philosopher, but we remember him for the history of manners, which is something else entirely. And I just finished reading, I guess it's the latest iteration of the Boyd Ed Richardson Project. It's a book by, I guess, a student of one of theirs, Joseph Henrik. So, yeah, you have to, if you're too narrowly boxed in to your field, especially if it's philosophy, that won't be good for you. But then there is also this.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and in the Phedrus, I guess Socrates floats the worry that written philosophy isn't really philosophy. It's sort of the fossil of the real philosophy. The real philosophy can only be the spoken philosophy. And the reason he gives is that you can't ask the text questions about things it doesn't talk about. And I take it that the Phedrus itself, this is very typical of Plato actually. His dialogues, there'll be moves that are made sort of textually and then moves that are made by way of dramatic frame. The Phedrus is Plato showing you how to write a dialogue, and he did this with almost all of his dialogues anyway, the ones we mostly read, that you can ask questions of and they will answer, right? The philosophical texts that survive that we keep reading all have this feature, or we wouldn't keep reading them. So the objection to Britain philosophy as opposed to philosophy as dialogue, maybe it's”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I don't know that piece of haddos. I do know his philosophy as a way of life. But this question was taken up very, very early in the history of philosophy. I guess it's in the Phedrus, right?”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that meant fighting his way out from under the father figures conception of that program and of the key concepts in it, like utility. So it's not surprising that there's a kind of emotional tone that I see in that essay of somebody dismissing their father, even though he does recognize that Bentham had real accomplishments. There's still that tone.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, don't even think of this as something that was once a radical innovation that a crackpot had to suggest, but putting stamps on an envelope and dropping it in the mailbox, that's Bentham. So he had great ideas mix up with other ideas that weren't so good. Okay, think about it this way. Mill, because I'm interested in Mill under the heading of thinking about the meaning of life. Mill started out as a protege of Jeremy Bentham. And so Bentham's view of the utilitarian project is we all struggle out of our teenage conceptions of what we're about and what we're going to do. Sometimes we turn our back on them, right? I mean, that's normal, but sometimes what we do, and this is what Mill did, is he worked his way to a different version of the utilitarian program that he was comfortable with and that he could live in.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, although Bentham was a very strange guy, he had a lot of bad ideas, but also a lot of really good ideas. And the good ideas, they speak for themselves. There's just so many of them.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you think that you can't actually get somebody to have something that lives up to the billing that really is the life project, there's no point in subsidizing it, subsidizing something that you can't get people to do. But people are built differently. I mean, again, if you think of there's something like a spectrum with more tightly wired people on one end and more tightly and more disintegrated people on the other end and different configurations in the middle, it's not as though there's any one thing we should be encouraging people to do different ways of approaching their lives are going to suit different people.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's how Nietzsche managed to actually write his last books. And for people, I guess like myself, and I suppose most of us, who are somewhere in the middle, who aren't so tightly wired, as wired as Mill and... And being as tightly wired as that isn't, in fact, an option. It doesn't work out to be as tightly wired as that. And so you should just give it up as an objective. The thing you might end up with might look to you like you're pursuing a single project if you're self-deceived about it, as you say. But we're already moving towards the middle of the spectrum.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inside subprojects, inside subprojects, and he was able to sustain this over most of his life. And for him, for a personality like that, the natural role for the meaning of his life is to be something that guides action. Be so good at acting. At the other extreme, we were already talking about Nietzsche, you have somebody who is completely disintegrated, giving him a big project which is going to sort of which he'll refer his decisions that's simply not going to work because he can't make plans and execute them. For him something you think he invented a number of values that you could think of as successive meanings of his life for the different configurations of his disintegrating personality. And because they couldn't tell him what to do, they had a different role, it's like by appealing, by serving as a kind of pole star to his different psychological psychic parts, they could keep the parts flying more or less in the same configuration.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the book is part of a larger project, and let me place it a little bit. So I actually do think Mill at various points, there were rough sides to his life. I mean, it wasn't all peaches and cream. Sure. But I'm not also, I don't think of the life as a failure or think that he shouldn't have done what he did or anything like that. That's not where I'm going. So I'm interested in looking at the role that something you would be comfortable describing as the meaning of somebody's life can play in a personality and in a life. But of course, what roles something can play depends on what the architecture of the personality in the life is. And people of differently structured personalities. Mill is interesting to me because he was a very mobized personality. I mean, he accomplished remarkable amounts, and it's all very, very structured. Sub-projects.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And as your very, very ambitious project gets more and more tightly wound, here's the actual punchline of the book. If what you were looking for was the unified project that it would occupy your whole life and be the meaning of your life, as the project gets more and more tightly wound, it starts to develop fissures. And you end up not having the unified project and the unified life.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You sort of have the impression that he's mostly focused, he's a view about saving the planet, and some of it is saving it down here by making everyone drive electric cars, and some of it is saving the planet by a moving humanity off of the planet or something, or maybe moving heavy industry off of the planet. So maybe that's his one big project, and then he has things he gets distracted by and they're sort of smaller. Or maybe he really has different projects. He's focused on cars, and he's also focused on space industry. I don't know. But it really does matter. Here's, I think, why. If you have one big project, a project that you think as the meaning of your life or that has that function, that role, not only does it tend to push everything else out, but you end up being very, very focused on getting the project to cohere internally, figuring out how to make all the parts fit together.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does matter. So maybe in Musk's case, we could. So, I haven't kind of looked into what he does. I only know what random people on the street know about him.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let me do a little bit of distinguishing and then kind of say kind of what I think the book was aiming for. A life that's full of projects in the plural might well be fine, I think.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And do you remember her discussion of, I guess she's considering the protagonist, and her line in the protagonist is that Socrates hedonism, on which you know, you make decisions on the basis of just producing the greatest amount of pleasure, and that's the only thing that matters, she says, that's not supposed to be how we are now. That's Socrates' recommendation for reforming our decision-making. Nusbaum goes on to talk a little bit about what the world is like in which people have done this. Tragedy doesn't make sense to them anymore because there are no tragic choices. It's just a matter of quantities of pleasure. And if your friend or lover dies, it doesn't matter because, you know, they were just the bearer of a certain quantity of pleasure and you go look for the pleasure elsewhere. And the ideas are supposed to start to look inhuman. And then you're supposed to think, what kind of decision was this supposed to be anyway? We're supposed to be looking to the reform program to make”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's two explanations. One is that every time somebody writes a holy book, it turns out to be a classic of world literature just on its own, right? The other possibility is when a book occupies a particular role in a culture, when it's that sort of reference point, the sensibilities of people in the culture reshape themselves around the book so that it is, in retrospect a classic. And Zarathustra, which is awful schlock, is inviting you to think what would have to happen to me for me to look at this book and have it seem as though it were like the King James. A classic of world literature. And at that point, you're supposed to go, whoa. Maybe this is a decision I need to think twice about. The point is sort of a relative of, I don't know if you remember Martha Nussbaum's fragility of goodness.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so if you look at the King James Bible, it's a classic of English literature. I mean, it's up there with Shakespeare. Every sentence almost is quotable. It's just wonderful, right? And if you look at Luther's Bible in German, also it's a”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me give a different spin on it so I won't argue back against the other way of looking at it directly. But let me give you an alternative way to see it. Suppose you invent a value and you want to make it socially real, which usually takes time. That's got two sides. It's got an external side normally. The way we normally do it is we institutionalize the value. So that has to do with creating a church or universities that teach students to do things a certain way or there are variations on this. But there's an internal flip side to that. You have to change people's tastes so that the new value becomes natural to them, right? You're changing their sensibility. I think Zarathustra's surface style is meant as an illustration of what that sensibility would look to us now before we have it. You're supposed to look at this.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want. So, in Zarathustra, this seems interesting to me. Nietzsche is setting up a problem, which he tries to solve in the books he was working on until the end of his life for the rest of his life. The awfulness of the, I mean, the slockiness of the book, the horrific sentimentality and sappiness and the over the top, I mean, all of that stuff, that's Nietzsche showing you what scripture looks like.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Criticism that we've pretty much forgotten about. And the common denominator of this school, the shared view, is that the people who actually write the holy texts of a religion come much later and they systematically misunderstand and misrepresent and have their own values are flipped upside down from the values of the founder, and so they misrepresent the history and the doctrines of the person founding the religion completely. Zarathustra is obviously meant to somehow stand in for Nietzsche's views. He talks about views that are familiar from other works. It seems to me that the exercise is to show that if you try to institutionalize the values Nietzsche wants you to invent and the values he's inventing, if you try to make it in the way that a religion institutionalizes values, the result will be completely perverse. They'll be turned upside down in inside out, and that's the last thing.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, it is a parody of the New Testament, but also of the Old Testament, and also apparently of the Quran, and also of Buddhist writings that Nietzsche knew about. So it's meant to be a parody or satire of religious scripture, but not the scripture of any particular religion. But my entry point is more the Bible we're familiar with because we have both Nietzsche's copy of a book about the Old Testament with his markings, so we know how he read it. We don't have his copy anymore, but we know that he read David Strauss's Life of Jesus. Here's how this ties to the program of inventing values that I described for you. The way Nietzsche writes Zarathustra as the holy text of a non-existent religion in a way that conforms to the views of the critics he was reading, this is a school of Bible”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I saw this footnote that said that Nietzsche had read Yulu's Valhausen's prologomina to the history of Israel. And I said to myself, I know what that means. Of course, I had to make sure. I actually trekked off to Weimar to look at Nietzsche's personal library. And I even equipped myself to be sort of a spy, an industrial spy because I needed to see his marginalia, you know that German handwriting has changed in the last hundred years along with the printed script. And so, you know, I didn't know that I could read it. But I also thought they wouldn't let me photocopy it. So I brought a concealed camera so that I could take pictures of the pages. But of course, then I didn't have to. And mostly Nietzsche, it turns out he underlines, and even I can read an underline. I don't have to read Gothic handwriting. Meyer thinks, the guy you mentioned, right, he thinks that Zarathustra is a parody of the New Testament. That's not exactly”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing. The alternative that's been emerging to these two camps in the last maybe few decades sometimes gets called constructivism. One way to think about Nietzsche's proposal is it's in the spirit of constructivism, but it's much more sophisticated. It's a few steps out from where we are right now. We're kind of in a place where that gesture will help some people to appreciate it, but he's doing way better than we are.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other milk group. Yeah. So if the facts about what you should do are already out there, well, you're not responsible. You're just doing what the, okay, and if it's like your feelings, well, you're not responsible for your feelings and you can't control them. When Nietzsche says what you do with values is invent them. We've done that always inadvertently, but now it's time to do it self-consciously. Not all the same for everybody. You can have idiosyncratic values. You can have temporary values. And they're not whims. no more than other inventions, maybe the ones coming out of your San Francisco now, right? The ones coming out of Silicon Valley, they're not whims. If they fly, there's a story about why they make sense. And that's an invitation to assume the responsibility within philosophy anyway. People have gone very far out of their way to slough off. That's a big deal. One way to think about it, again, in this next step.”
2021-06-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Elijah Millgram on the Philosophical Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source